Survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire share their personal accounts of the blaze that killed 72 people, revealing the decisions that saved their lives, some of which were in defiance of official advice, and remembering the friends, neighbours and loved ones who did not make it out of the building.

THE GOVERNMENT was forced into an embarrassing U-turn today after Grenfell justice campaigners branded a review into the circumstances surrounding the devastating fire a “betrayal.”

Labour MPs led a furious backlash into Dame Judith Hackitt’s report on reforming building regulations in the wake of the June 14 disaster that left at least 71 people dead as it failed to recommend banning combustible cladding and “desktop studies” — approving the use of materials without real-life safety tests.

“… This is not an abstract issue. It is impacting on people’s mental health all over the country, people are not able to sleep because they have cladding and they are not sure whether it is safe, they have got fire marshals outside their doors.

“They need reassurance now and the government must act.”

Shelter chief executive officer Polly Neate said the charity was “deeply concerned” that less than 4 per cent of 189 social housing blocks with Grenfell-style cladding have had the material entirely removed.

Grenfell United chairman Shahin Sadafi said that the campaign group had specifically asked Ms Hackitt to ban combustible cladding at a meeting.

He added: “We are disappointed and saddened that she didn’t listen to us and she didn’t listen to other experts.

Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety has evoked widespread outrage for failing to recommend that the type of highly flammable cladding installed on Grenfell Tower—and many other public and private buildings around the UK—should be banned: here.

It took a 150,000-strong petition and the prospect of a parliamentary debate to force the Prime Minister to reverse her earlier refusal to allow an independent panel to sit alongside the government-appointed judge who will preside over the Grenfell inquiry — and even now that merely consists of just two members sitting in on phase two of the inquiry only.

Shadow housing secretary John Healey’s letter to his Tory counterpart James Brokenshire is right to demand a “complete overhaul” of a building safety checks and controls regime designed to minimise hassle for business rather than protect the public.

Current Home SecretarySajid Javid headed up the Cutting Red Tape initiative which bragged, six months before Grenfell, that fire safety inspections had been cut from six hours to just 45 minutes in duration to allow “managers to quickly get back to their day job.”

A crystal-clear presumption of responsibility devolving on the owner — private, municipal or otherwise — is essential to ensuring this is not the case in the future.

So too are “more robust sanctions” where buildings are found to be unsafe. Giving councils the right to confiscate privately owned tower blocks as Labour suggests would be positive and form part of the party’s wider approach to reviving local democracy, which has been hollowed out over years in which councils have become little more than distributors of ever more limited central government funding.

Whatever May might promise when backed into a corner, those policies have not altered. Justice for Grenfell means electing a Corbyn-led government prepared to face down business interests and deliver real change.

Grenfell families shouldn’t have to fight for justice. The granting of a panel for the Grenfell inquiry is a step forward, but why has it taken so long, so much effort, and why is its role so limited, asks RICHARD BURGON.

The firefighters union, the FBU, states that the same poisonous foam insulation was banned from use in furniture after years of campaigning. On 8th May 1979, toxic fumes from plastic foam-filled furniture killed 10 people and left 47 injured in the Woolworths store in Manchester city centre.

Vigorous campaigning by the FBU and other fire safety experts, including enlightened chief fire officers, paved the way for vital safety changes as the death toll from toxic plastic fumes continued to mount in the 1980s. But it took nearly nine years after the Woolworth’s fire and the deaths of 17 more children, killed by toxic fumes in their own homes, for the government to act.

Mike Fordham retired from the FBU 12 years ago, after a lifetime campaigning for improved fire safety. As he watched the live TV footage of flames shooting up the sides of Grenfell Tower, his thoughts turned immediately to earlier fire tragedies. ‘They’ve put the stuff we got banned from the inside of buildings on the outside of tower blocks … we got foam furniture banned for giving off horrendous toxic fumes and they went and lined the outside of tower blocks with similar stuff’, he said.

“What happened at Grenfell, that was an act of war/The murder of innocent people who died because they’re poor/Hundreds of deaths and you can bet that there’s be more/So if you think that you survived it, I wouldn’t be so sure…”

Written in loose rhyming couplets, sometimes conversational, sometimes hectoring, the book takes issue with the brazen dishonesty of so much contemporary political “common sense”, including austerity (“How can people work so hard and still not be surviving?”), nuclear deterrence (“Try and invest money into lives instead of Trident/Try jobs, try housing, try education/Try welfare, not warfare… Put Trident on trial and try choosing a future.”)

He declares: ”The more I see the more it seems we need a revolution” In The Rhyming Guide to Voting:

“I always said that, I wouldn’t vote if they paid me/That’s what I said before Corbyn said he’d pay me/£10 per hour, when I’m at work. Minimum…/Many on the left would say that he’s the best we’ve had/That he’s the best we’ve got now, that he’s the best we’ll have/He murked the game and worked his way further than ever expected/And now he’s an inch from getting elected…’

Although Gerda Stevenson is a hugely distinguished actor, director, musician and playwright, her poetry is less well-known. Her second collection Quines: Poems in Tribute to Women of Scotland (Luath, £9.99) will surely change that.

It’s a book of huge ambition and radical purpose, a kind of history of Scotland told through the lives of almost 70 women, from the Gaelic warrior princess Sgathach to Tessa Ransford, the founder of the Scottish Poetry Library in the 21st century.

It’s a collection of snapshots and historical vignettes, scenes from great lives — some famous, some forgotten — and all are extraordinary. Artists, doctors, missionaries, politicians, writers and scientists, as well as the team that beat England in 1881 in the first recorded women’s international football match (“The wind was against us — but wasn’t it ever?”), all speak to us in their own voices.

And there is a long sequence about Helen Crawfurd, suffragette, pacifist and foundation member of the Communist Party.

“The toil of oil and soot-black shipbuilders,/traipsing home at dusk to bow-legged bairns … the whole world is theirs by right … Here in the Second City of the Empire,/where a fanfared judge steps from his carriage/at the High Court, our ranks are ready for his bailiffs …’

And this is Helen Macfarlane, who first translated The Communist Manifesto into English.

“I’ve always seen Red … Red raw my sisters’ eyes — how they cried/when the mills went down … Red the robin’s breast on a winter branch … And red, red my thoughts that flow with His tidings,/onto page after page: how can we leave a single soul to die/by inches in squalid lanes and gutters, making slop shirts/at tuppence apiece, while another is swathed in silk?”

Adults are just harmless mate-seeking machines in city-soot tones. But when a new generation’s caterpillars finish their second molt into a sort of preteen stage, their short barbed hairs (called setae) can prick an irritating, rash-causing protein into any overconfident fool who pokes them. Even people who’d never torment, or even touch, a caterpillar can suffer as stray hairs waft on spring breezes. (More on that below.)

The caterpillars aren’t much for house cleaning. The baggy silk nest a group spins itself high in several kinds of oak trees accumulates cast-off skins still hairy with the toxic protein.

The name processionary comes from the caterpillars lining up head-to-rump. “A column of caterpillars moving together like a train,” is how evolutionary biologist Jim Costa of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., describes it. A little rearrangement can get processions trudging round and round in a circle.

Annoyances aside, these creatures represent part of the glorious but underappreciated social side of insects, Fitzgerald says. Ants, bees, wasps and termites have long been the social insects, but building joint nests and traveling in caravans are just some of caterpillars’ coordinated projects. If fish or birds did that, he grumbles, they’d be acclaimed as “fabulous animals.”

Inspired by this rethink, Costa published “The Other Insect Societies.” Admittedly caterpillars, too young for sex anyway, don’t have the extreme reproductive specialty of a honeybee queen with a whole caste of sterile workers. But then people don’t either, and we certainly think we’re pretty social.

Why touching these caterpillars is a bad idea

Here’s why the latest spring invasion of oak processionary caterpillars is prompting health warnings and eradication efforts across the London area.

These caterpillars can sport as many as 630,000 setae, hairlike structures just 100 to 500 micrometers long. These hairs can detach and land on skin, in soil, on clothes and wherever else the breeze carries them, retaining their power to irritate long after the caterpillars are gone.

“But after everything they have been through, the bereaved families and the survivors should never have had to wage this campaign.

“The demand for a panel was always about ensuring the trust of the community in the inquiry and it should have been delivered from the start.

“For the Grenfell inquiry to deliver truth and justice, it must always have the full confidence of the bereaved families and survivors and it is essential that, going forward, all their other demands are properly met.”